so ends 2008.

last night on the train i was reading about the voluntary human extinction movement, an organisation whose members believe that "the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species...us". the notion is refreshing -- psychology is almost by definition a tediously anthropocentric discipline, and i think it's good for me once in a while to forget the ways in which humans are special and meditate on the many other ways in which we are not. i always think that p.d. james got it wrong in children of men: that the prospect of human extinction, voluntary or otherwise, will not ultimately be terrifying, but after a short while will be humbling, and finally, liberating. not having to think about legacy or posterity seems to me one of the best ways to live in the now, a path to contentment all to easy to stray from.

anyway, make nice plans for 2009, but not too many of them. i'm going out now to get wasted. happy new year!

have decided that in order to be a single malt aficionado, i have to possess more than one bottle of single malt -- my collection doubled yesterday with the purchase of an ardbeg 10yo, which i only found after poking through about 10 stores on the lower west side. pennsylvania, as think i've mentioned before, only has state-licensed liquor stores, which means glenlivets, macallans, and a whole host of other undrinkable shit. i would dearly love to get my hands on some stuff from this list, although that probably involves actual trips to the distilleries and spending more money than i have in my bank account. fine, it would be nice to lay eyes on them, for a start, or for a multi-millionaire in deerstalker and tweed jacket to have me over for tastes and genteel conversation.

the time since the brother arrived seems to have passed very quickly, and now we're facing down the new year. i think it would be nice next year to do more -- 2008 was mostly more of the same, and not really in a good way. what i had to say on my blog this year seems less generally interesting than what i did from 2006-2007 as well, and it would be nice if that changed.

we did our mid-year patient clean out today, getting rid of our more treatment-resistant cases, which is simultaneously awesome and sad. even though we got into this practicum knowing that we're not going to actually cure many of our patients in the time we have, it's hard to not have the expectation that they'll end up happy, grateful. that attitude, though, is just one step removed from the naive "why can't they just try harder to be happy?" line of reasoning -- for many patients, even therapy isn't enough. in the end, something gets us, for most people, it's heart disease, cancer, the common things, but for some, it's depression, and somehow, that feels less ok. less ok, because there's that niggling illusion that the patient just didn't want it enough, or worse still, that the therapist wasn't persuasive enough, that someone in that alliance didn't try. when drugs don't work, it's a lot harder to place blame; with therapy, there's always someone to point a finger at, and no matter how much you tell yourself that there is no "fault", it was not a matter of "trying", the feeling, the very human feeling that somewhere things screwed up: that's something that lingers, and is hard to chase away.

the brother got in on wednesday night, flight delayed a mere four hours, so all that's left is the adjusting. there's nothing like colliding umvelts to jolt you out of routine; i really feel that all that's old is new, that perceptions stale and dormant now seem fresh and alive once more. what we tell our patients is true, that thinking about something and doing it are very often not the same experience, and no amount of anticipation of this change is quite going to match the reality of it playing out.

cp: i note with tears in my eyes that we will not be able to watch the latest keanu reeves masterpiece the day the earth stood still together, my solace being that he will continue to make similarly bad movies for a longer time than i'll take to finish my degree (i hope.)

i was on the treadmill on saturday when i got what i think is my first truly ingenious idea of grad school. my ridiculous paranoia on being scooped prevents me from detailing it here (i know i'm crazy), but i will say that it costs no money and potentially answers a very interesting question (plus gets me one study closer to being done with these sisyphean labors). the "no money" part is critically important, but i'm hoping that it's good science as well.

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with the brother arriving in two days to start school here, the next big change to our uber-complicated family situation is here. the other housemate's lease doesn't run out till september, but it looks like we might be living together for the first extended period of time since forever come fall. it seems strange to even have to make an issue about this, but mine is a strange life.

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it's prompted other thoughts. i have known this for a while, but now, this winter is the first time i've felt, deeply, that things are truly never going to be the same again, that ever more i'm going to have that shao xiao li jia lao da hui sensation when i go back to singapore. everything seems a very long time ago, receding fast. i guess at the same time, though, i'm less afraid of the consequences once it does happen; once you're out of the gravitational field of normalcy and others' expectations, you're free to float as far into outer space as you care to go. i need more waterwheels and train rides through europe in my life. can i graduate yet?

more fun in the old days

Kollar et al. (1969) in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(4) pg 73 --

At 168 hours [of sleep deprivation] one of the subjects (R.S.) experienced frightening visual hallucinations while in the darkened psychophysiology laboratory. He screamed in terror, pulled his electrodes off, and fell to the floor sobbing and muttering incoherently about a gorilla. He was conforted and reassured by one of the investigators and questioned in detail about the experience. In essence, his hallucination had recapitulated night terrors, which he had had repeatedly as a small bpy. During the next psychophysiological test period he began to experience the same hallucinations and bolted from the subject room. Thereafter he proudly reported that he had "licked" his problem.

as the culmination of the seminar i'm taking this semester, our prof packed us off to a correctional facility to have a look-see and speak with the inmates about their experiences and rehabilitation. i'm glad to report that this was more educational and less scary than it sounds -- if you imagine a straight line between fox river and oswald state penitentiary, we're talking way over on the left side in terms of shanking and sex slavery (i think). i must say that i was probably more scared going into the locked wards of imh, though i was somewhat more tender at the time. also in uniform, though, so perhaps it balances out.

ugly pink exterior, lots of electronically-operated doors sliding slowly open and shut, each door with its own big orange sign: HOLDING CELL 12, SALLYPORT 2. long, wide, strange-smelling corridors. also, according to the sergeant who accompanied us, lots of technology that doesn't work -- id tags that don't scan, a fancy drug detector on the fritz -- and a registrar's office that would be right at home in, oh, 1978; filing cabinets wall to wall and not a PC in sight. this was the stuff we actually got to see; i shudder to think of the disorganization that lies beneath. fortunately, my cynicism re: such affairs peaked circa 1999, and these things neither surprise nor disturb me any more. we released someone early and they went out and murdered you? oops!

we got to speak with a group of a dozen or so of the inmates who were part of a drug treatment program (it was never clear to me what precisely any of them were serving time for, and none of us found it appropriate to ask. is there prison etiquette? someone needs to write a book on this.) most of the answers they gave us were of the for-the-bible-(or-in-this-case-my-parole-officer)-tells-me-so variety, but then again, what can either side offer in a situation like that but platitudes? incarceration is just one small part of a system that shits on you if you're one of any number of things -- poor, uneducated, black -- but that's not a card anyone at the table was willing to play.

did i feel sorry for them? wholeheartedly yes. i've blogged at some length about neuroethics and the law; in summary, i'm in full agreement that punishment should be utilitarian but not retributive since broken mind = broken brain. what this means, sadly, is that no one really deserves to be in jail, they just need to be. and, to complete the argument, the real tragedy is not the steady, inexorable influx of people into the prisons, but the fact that as humans ourselves we can, and must, think of these people as individuals instead of statistics.

i know this is a rather strange way to think -- let me end on a less confusing (though just as depressing) note. the drug "treatment" program that these folks were in seemed to hang almost entirely on the premise that if one changes ones mind, and has sufficient willpower, life will get better. this is the perfect recipe for recidivism, and entirely out of whack with what we've learned from psychotherapy research over the past 50-or-so years. if you're an alcoholic or a crackhead, willpower just isn't enough; what you get instead is guilt and self-blame when the "changing-ones-mind" deal doesn't pan out. and as wonderful as the social workers and the platitudes are, one could not help leaving the place more than a bit despondent, with the sense that things are as they were in the beginning, and that they forever shall be, in saecula saeculorum.